Looker

Farrah in Space

Jungle Fever

Werner Herzog is famous for his cinematic depictions of obsessives and outsiders, from the El Dorado-seeking Spaniard played by Klaus Kinski in his 1972 international breakthrough, "Aguirre: The Wrath of God," to Timothy Treadwell, the doomed bear-worshiper of his 2005 documentary, "Grizzly Man." Herzog's own reputation as an obsessive, not to mention daredevil and doomsayer, was solidified by "Burden of Dreams," a documentary chronicling Herzog's trials while filming "Fitzcarraldo" in the Peruvian jungle in 1981.

"Conquest of the Useless: Reflections From the Making of 'Fitzcarraldo' " comprises Herzog's diaries from the three arduous years he worked on that movie, which earned him a best director award at Cannes in 1982 yet nearly derailed his career. It reveals him to be witty, compassionate, microscopically observant and — your call — either maniacally determined or admirably persevering.

Read the rest of my review of Conquest of the Useless here, in the Los Angeles Times.

Memory Lane

Chris Marker's "La Jetée" has been a totem for nearly half a century. It's a haunting half-hour film enshrouded in mystique.

Marker (born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve in 1921, either outside Paris, as many sources say, or in Ulan Bator, as the writer and director has claimed), has a godlike reputation among cinephiles, thanks both to the ingenious and often playful nature of his essayistic films (he's made dozens) and to his obscurity. He grants few interviews and almost never allows himself to be photographed. Only a fraction of his movies are available on DVD.

Thankfully, "La Jetée" is one of them. Marker's only fiction film, it was made in 1962, and chances are that either you've never heard of it or you think it's a masterpiece.

Read the rest of my review of Chris Marker: La Jetée in today's Los Angeles Times.

And You Thought Charlton Heston Was a Right-Wing Nutjob

Jon Voight speaking at a Republican fund-raising dinner at the Washington Convention Center, June 9.

No Pain, No Gain

In Notes on Sontag, his refreshingly ambivalent consideration of Susan Sontag’s life and work, Phillip Lopate devotes a concise section to her film essays. Sontag was known for going to the movies nearly every day, but, as Lopate points out, her tastes changed in her final decade:

For Sontag, watching a movie had become too easy; it lacked agon. With a few exceptions: “Syberberg’s unprecedented ambition in Hitler: A Film from Germany is on another scale from anything one has seen on film. It is work that requires a special kind of attention and partisanship; and invites being reflected upon, reseen. … As was said ruefully of Wagner, he spoils our tolerance for the others.” Sontag’s championing of extra-long German films can be traced to her growing appetite for Gesamtkunstwerk on the Wagnerian scale (the Ring itself, and Robert Wilson’s productions, such as Einstein on the Beach, which she boasted of having sat through more than a dozen times). About Hitler, she wrote: “Its length is suitably exhaustive—seven hours; and, like the Ring, it is a tetralogy.” Even more “suitably exhaustive” was Fassbinder’s fifteen-hour-plus Berlin Alexanderplatz. She seemed to rate an artwork in direct proportion to the number of hours it took to experience it. She was demonstrating, as she said about Artaud, a “taste for spiritual and physical effort—for art as an ordeal.” She had become the Queen of Sitzfleish.*

*A Yiddish word meaning the ability to apply one’s posterior to the seat for as long as it takes.

Rumble in the Jungle

The following is excerpted from Werner Herzog’s Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo, which will be published next month.

Camisea, Peru, 22 April 1981

I had a violent, absurd quarrel with Kinski about his mineral water, with which he wants to wash himself now. Otherwise peace and quiet. Suddenly Kinski started yelling again, but it had no connection to anything here. He was beside himself, calling Sergio Leone and Corbucci rotten, no-good so-and-sos and total assholes. It took a long time for him to wear himself out. Then his yelling flared up again briefly, as he called Fellini a bungling idiot, a fat bastard. Then in late morning I finally got some sleep.

Commando

If you've ever wondered what became of Jean-Paul Belmondo after his '60s heyday, now you know. And it's not pretty.

Space Case

At left: VHS, a sculpture by the young Seattle artist David Herbert. It’s eight feet tall, made of Styrofoam and Plexiglas, and owned by Charles Saatchi. (Giant images here.) Herbert’s website has a few more pieces that suggest a healthy obsession with 2001, but this one’s videotape-as-monolith concept is simply ingenious.

Velvet Goldmine

There’s a witty song on John Wesley Harding’s latest album called “The End” (you can listen to it here) in which every line imagines how something unnamed will come to an end. And movie climaxes are suggested more than once. There’s the obligatory “It’ll end with the chance of a sequel for sure,” but to me the funniest couplet is this one: “It’ll end with a war, it’ll end all wrong/It’ll end with a new David Bowie song.” Right? How many movies of the past quarter century end with a (generally incongruous) new David Bowie song? The Falcon and the Snowman, Seven, and Memento rush to mind, but there are surely many, many more. Care to name some, dear readers?

Shooting Pictures

Dissolute movie producers have told all in books like The Kid Stays in the Picture and You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. But what about the less flashy producers, those staid men and women who anxiously strive to keep their budgets and directors under control?

That's the story Michael Deeley means to tell in Blade Runners, Deer Hunters, and Blowing the Bloody Doors Off: My Life in Cult Movies.

Deeley, an Englishman who produced The Italian Job, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Deer Hunter, Blade Runner and other memorable films, stumbled into a job as an assistant editor at 20 and within a few years…

Read the rest of this review here, on the website of the Los Angeles Times.